Nothing's a Gift, It's All On Loan
by polar-realm
Summary: T'Pring and Spock. Two survivors in the aftermath of Vulcan, and reconciliation.


A/N: Credit where due, title is stolen from the poem "Nothing's a Gift," by Wislawa Szymborska.

* * *

><p>The first lesson of the desert is that there is nothing you can keep.<p>

T'Pring rises before the dawn when the air is cold and clear, throws thin sheets from her body and stretches to banish the remnants of sleep from her mind. After washing and dressing, performing the morning rituals and all the small comforts of routine, she leaves her house and stands, for a moment, in the dark and silence of early morning, looking out across a desert that is not her home.

There are dwellings carved into the rock face of the cliffs behind her, and a steep, narrow stairway winding down the curve of the mountain. The sand blowing around her feet is white as bone, fine and gritty, and on the line of the horizon, at the edge of her vision where sand and sky meet, there is a city that is not the city of her birth. And there is a spaceport there, still in the process of completion, rising up stark against the early morning sky.

T'Pring wraps a brightly woven shawl around her hair to shield against the wind and drifting dust, lifts her pack onto her back and sets off down the winding path. She is needed in the city. The Council is reconvening, taking back power from the interim government, and it is her right and her duty now to stand as nominal leader of her clan. The only heir remaining. At the venerable old age of twenty-eight.

If it were not for that, she thinks. If not for that, she might have taken to the stars by now, but there are responsibilities. Not always to tradition, or to the Elders and their edicts, but responsibilities nonetheless. Still, she travels more slowly than efficiency dictates, pauses to watch the sun rise over distant cliffs and the settlement reawaken, and on her way to the transportation center she stops to run her fingers through the cold water of a fountain built in the center of a city square. Such luxuries would not have existed on Vulcan; water on that world was too precious to leave for the open air. Not so here. She thinks of that, of those old austerities, and closes her eyes against the memory.

It has been a month and seven days since her world was taken. The thought of it hangs heavy in the air, persists beyond reason, and if the awareness of time has always been a part of her, wound tight through the core of her muscles and her bones, it is more so now. One month. Seven days. She dips her hands into the water, holds it pooled within her cupped palms, then lets it fall between her fingers onto the cracked ground.

There is comfort in ritual, and in the flow of water over skin: _this is life. Be grateful._ There is the smell of spices and baking food from the streets around her, the rumble of vehicles and the sound of conversation, and she hears music somewhere from a distant flute, rising up high and clear into the resounding emptiness. But all of that matters little in the end. She is not so illogical as to expect that it will endure. She lifts her pack again, puts memory aside, and walks on.

* * *

><p>The second lesson: life must pay for life.<p>

That one she had learned early, and by rote. She recalls kneeling, the tiled floor hard and cold against her knees, as the matriarch of her clan presses thin, calloused fingers to her forehead. She had been young then, undisciplined, more concerned with the open desert outside the window than with the lessons at hand. But she had listened, and she had learned. She recalls strong, sure hands braiding up her hair, fixing her collar in place, the fall of light in dusty halls and the sound of footsteps and voices just above the threshold of hearing, echoing in the ancient house. The old woman had ruled those halls and that ground like some natural force, an entity distilled down to the withered essence of herself, not entirely comprehensible. T'Pring had feared her, once, with her calm eyes and unforgiving wisdom. Loved her once. The line is a thin one, and sharp enough to draw blood.

The matriarch is dead now, and T'Pring survives.

She burns incense each day in the old woman's memory, burns paper and dried flowers, other useless precious things. She pours water out on the sand for every cup she drinks, as her ancestors had done beneath a different and harsher sun – the oldest known offering of life to the dead, that gift of water, older than blood, older than any burnt offering. She works to learn the ways of this new planet as she had known the old, how to find water in the dry land, and food, the shifts in pressure and humidity that warn of a sandstorm gathering force on the horizon. All the ways and means of survival. And what she dreams of in the nameless hours is not mercy or justice, nor even understanding, but rain.

What unnerves her most about this new world is the effortless luxury of it. There are edible plants that grow uncultivated along the roadways, rain with no season and no warning, water to be used for nothing more than washing the dirt from one's skin. People here already speak as if these things are merely ordinary, to be accepted, relied on, without regard for the nature of uncertainty. T'Pring does not believe in gifts. Instead each passing storm leaves her with the sense of something owed, another debt that may be called in unexpectedly and without recourse. _This is life_, her grandmother's voice whispers. _It does not come free._

And _yes_, she thinks, pulling her shawl closer around herself and watching the weather through the window of her hovercar, _yes, she knows that_.

She does not know how to quantify the knowledge – in truth, she is uncertain it _can_ be quantified, and T'Pring has no use for ambiguous or imprecise data, so she lets it stand unexamined. Untested. These are not boundaries that have ever been clear to her. But more and more often, she looks out at the world and feels words trapped behind her tongue: _I want –_

But she cannot ever get past _I want_, because it is unclear to her what it is that she is or ought to be wanting. There are too many variables to consider, and none of them properly defined. She wants to lift the fabric of the universe and see what lies beneath, to mark it all down in beautiful, precise equations, theorems, formulae. She wants to know the structure that lies beneath the curve of every dune, the sweep of the hot, dry winds that blow in from the high mountains. She wants to make this universe hers, to name the component parts and patterns of it and by that naming claim them.

There are moments when she wants so much, and so desperately, that it hurts to think of it. And then there are moments when she cannot make herself want anything at all.

* * *

><p>The third lesson is this: that nothing can be acted upon, but that something else is changed.<p>

That is what the scientist in her knows, the old certainties honed and tempered in the laboratory, bent over crucible or computer terminal at the Academy-that-was. Gain or loss, it matters little, or not at all. Nothing can be changed, but that something else is taken.

And so she monitors motion and emotion, action and impulse, and knows well the consequences of a faulty step or an imprecise measurement, the slightest perturbation of equilibrium. There are elements that burn in water and in air, blinding-bright, others that must be cooled by careful increments, or stored in isolation to prevent reaction, and she is familiar with them all. There is no relevant distinction between chemistry and biology and physics, after all, in the purest sense, at the microcosmic level. That which is, is.

Catalysis. The precipitation of crisis. These things, too, she understands.

But the man who meets her at the spaceport is a different man than the one she remembers. And what it is he has lost, and what he has gained in the losing, she does not know and cannot guess – only that something in him has been altered. It is evident in the way he stands, the curiously formal set of his shoulders and the way he raises his eyes to her face, carefully, as if seeing for the first time something that has always been there.

He says her name, and the sound of it carried on his voice is dry and hollow in the rising wind. She does not know how to think of him, this one who is to be her husband. He carries the innocence of the powerful with him as if by birthright, and does not think to look beyond it. She sees the image of herself reflected back in his eyes, and perceives herself kin to hydrogen, to nitrogen, bound and volatile.

And: _this too is life. Do not forget it._

And that is true, and like all obvious answers, it is ruthless in its simplicity. Any chain can be broken. Even nuclear bonds can be sundered. Even water, so changeless in its fluidity, may shift form. But Spock's eyes are dark and cautious in a face that seems too young for the shadows that mark him, and they are both of them alien here, in this desert beneath this sky, and it has been one month and eight days, fifteen hours, thirty-six seconds since their world was taken. He looks tired, hollowed out by the grief that all of them feel and none will express, and it occurs to her that there is somewhat less of innocence to him now, and more of understanding.

"You came here to speak with me," she says, not ungently. "So speak."

"I have been given reason to believe," he says, "that I have done thee wrong." His voice is careful, formal. The words are not ones she had ever expected to hear from him.

"Perhaps," she says, and bows her head as a politician might, concedes the point willingly and concedes nothing else. This is uncertain ground here, still – too many variables to consider, and none of them, _none_ of them can be fully quantified. She holds the name of the House of Surak in her mind, weighs it against Council influence, gains and losses, power she might need. These are dangerous times, though none will admit it. Spock speaks dangerously. And his next words – "I would release thee, T'Pring – if thou will it?" Those words in these times are most dangerous of all. But she thinks too of small ripples in still water, radiating and converging, weather patterns shifting, and knows that there is more at stake here than the obvious.

And when they leave the Healer's house, the wind is blowing dust along the path at her feet and the streets are awash in clear alien sunlight, and the equilibrium she seeks for is not the equilibrium she knows. It is the first time since the age of seven that she has been alone in her own mind, and she is not yet certain, at this point, whether or not she finds the solitude comfortable. She feels lighter for it, even so. Hydrogen still, unanchored and unchanged. She and Spock walk side by side, uneasy in each other's presence. They do not speak. Unnecessary words do not come easily to her, and as for him – his thoughts, his actions, she has never been able to predict, nor the reasons behind them.

The journey to the spaceport is not a long one, which is well. Spock has duties to return to, he says, and she has Council work, and even now, even now there is no peace in the stillness between them. But she walks beside him without speaking, isolation ringing in the darkness behind her eyes and every breath her own and no other's, watches him ascend the transporter pad in silence and realizes, with disorienting suddenness, that she cannot say what this or any other future will hold.

"S'Chn T'Gai," she says. He turns back, even that motion precise and restrained, and she hesitates. Clemency is not her habit. But neither had it been his, until now, and all that serves to prove is that things may change from second to second, world to world. She thinks of rain, of water poured out onto dry sand, and every other small thing offered up unbidden with no expectation of recompense. Older than blood. Older than breath and bone and any burnt offering, and it occurs to her, not for the first time, that _that which is_ says nothing at all of that which might yet be.

"S'chn T'Gai," she says again. "Spock. There are no debts between us."

He nods slightly, almost imperceptibly, and she finds herself struck by the unexpected surety that he is not so much of a stranger as she had thought.

"Live long and prosper, T'Pring."

"Peace and long life," she says. It is not a pact, nor a promise. It is not a gift.

She means it, even so.

He raises his hand in a silent farewell, suspended there for an instant, and then he is gone in a haze of blue and shimmering light, and the space where he had been holds only sun and desert.

It is an ending. It is a beginning.


End file.
